There is no #IoT #Stack

Posted on November 24th, 2015

Tom Luczak, @flowthings.io talked about building #InternetOfThings applications and demonstrated a sample application with walkthrough of the code.

Tom’s view is that there is such a wide range of challenges and methods to implement IoT that no single system or set of system stack will be the best solution or even an adequate solution. Power and cost limitations will drive the solution in some cases. In other cases, the decision will be dominated by speed of data transmission, package size, system security, or distance to communicate.

Due to these varying requirements, no one has come up with a best solution that can be Googled. Also the hardware limitations much be considered when designing the software. This means that IoT requires more innovative thinking to fit the application to the physical world – as limited by the world and as a method to control the physical devices.

He made recommendations based on this world view

IoT breaks from past software since it is not designed for humans, but for control of objects

If you a student majoring in CS you should minor in Electrical Engineering

Computing power will become cheaper so more applications will be best controlled by LINUX processors

Only specialized applications with severe price or power limitations will use ARM processors

The handling of unstructured data will become more and more important

#Blockchain may hold the key to fully integrating IoT devices with commerce

Expect to see Bluetooth and other low power networks in neighborhoods

Does not see a large company setting the standard system stack for IoT

Design and build the system using off-the-shelf software and hardware. The mix is the challenge.

Tom concluded by demonstrating a toy application in which a proximity sensor monitors the location of a “car” relative to a “storm” and sounds a horn on a web page if the car comes too close to the storm. He simulated a storm using a Bluetooth low energy beacon. Both the car and the storm run on Intel Edison chips. The car chip sends data to the cloud which monitors the distance and sounds the alarm.

Tom noted issues with the Yocto version of Linux running on the Edison and the difficulty of programming the #Bluetooth devices.